What is "muraqqa"

A Muraqqa is an album in book form containing Islamic miniature paintings and specimens of Islamic calligraphy, normally from several different sources, and perhaps other matter. The album was popular among collectors in the Islamic world, and by the later 16th century became the predominant format for miniature painting in the Persian Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman empires, greatly affecting the direction taken by the painting traditions of the Persian miniature, Ottoman miniature and Mughal miniature. The album largely replaced the full-scale illustrated manuscript of classics of Persian poetry, which had been the typical vehicle for the finest miniature painters up to that time. The great cost and delay of commissioning a top-quality example of such a work essentially restricted them to the ruler and a handful of other great figures, who usually had to maintain a whole workshop of calligraphers, artists and other craftsmen, with a librarian to manage the whole process. An album could be compiled over time, page by page, and often included miniatures and pages of calligraphy from older books that were broken up for this purpose, and allowed a wider circle of collectors access to the best painters and calligraphers, although they were also compiled by, or presented to, shahs and emperors. The earliest muraqqa were of pages of calligraphy only; it was at the court in Herat of the Timurid prince Baysunghur in the early 15th century that the form became important for miniature painting. The word muraqqa means "that which has been patched together" in Persian.

The works in an album, typically of different original sizes, were trimmed or mounted on standard size pages, often with new border decoration being added. When the compilation was considered complete it was bound, often very luxuriously, with an Islamic book-cover that might be highly decorated with lacquered paint, gold stamping on leather, or other techniques. Other muraqqa might be bound in a special concertina-like form. Many were arranged with pages of calligraphy facing miniatures, the matching of verse to image allowing some scope for the creativity of the compiler. Albums containing only calligraphy tended to be arranged chronologically to show the development of a style. The bindings of many albums allowed items to be added and removed, or they were just removed from the centre of the page, and such changes were often made; some albums had marks which allow changes to be traced. The grandest albums had specially written prefaces which are the source of a high proportion of surviving contemporary writing on the arts of the book, and the biographies of painters and calligraphers; these tended to be written by calligraphers. For calligraphers too the single page for an album became the "bread and butter" source of income, using mostly texts from poetry, whether extracts from a long classic or ghazal lyrics, but sometimes an extract from the Qu'ran, perhaps given the place of honour at the start of the album. Album pages often have areas of decorated illumination (as in the illustration) that share their motifs with other media, notably book-covers and carpet designs, the best of which were in fact probably mostly produced by the same type of artist at court, and sent to the weavers.

While the classic Islamic illuminated manuscript tradition had concentrated on rather crowded scenes with strong narrative content as illustrations in full texts of classic and lengthy works like the Shahnameh and the Khamsa of Nizami, the single miniature intended from the start for a muraqqa soon developed as a simpler scene with fewer, larger, figures, often showing idealized beauties of either sex in a garden setting, or genre figures from nomadic life, usually with no real or fictional identities attached to them. In Mughal India realistic portraiture, nearly always of rulers or courtiers, became a very common feature, and in Ottoman Turkey portraits of the Sultans, often very stylised, were a particular speciality. Fully coloured scenes tended to give way to part-drawn and part-painted ones, or to figures with little or no background. The album to some extent overlaps with the anthology, a collection of different pieces where the main emphasis is on the texts, but which can also include paintings and drawings inserted from different sources.